| Pages in topic: [1 2] > | Do you use OpenSource software on a regular basis, as an alternative to MS Office? Thread poster: Tom in London
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Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 22:29
Member (2008)
Italian to English
In my opinion we should all be working our way, gradually, away from these pay-every-month rip-off applications and adopting OpenSource applications instead - supporting them with small financial contributions as and when we can. This is surely the way of the future.
So far I'm a satisfied user of an OpenSource browser (Firefox) and an OpenSource email client (Thunderbird).
I'm getting more and more fed up with MSOffice so I've tried using LibreOffice instead - which ... See more In my opinion we should all be working our way, gradually, away from these pay-every-month rip-off applications and adopting OpenSource applications instead - supporting them with small financial contributions as and when we can. This is surely the way of the future.
So far I'm a satisfied user of an OpenSource browser (Firefox) and an OpenSource email client (Thunderbird).
I'm getting more and more fed up with MSOffice so I've tried using LibreOffice instead - which is a worthy effort to make available an OpenSource free office suite that is compatible with MSOffice.
However LibreOffice is far from perfect and the latest version for Mac, which I've just installed, has various glitches - and it crashes.
Your thoughts? ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Open but not always good | Aug 23, 2022 |
I tried OpenOffice some years ago, but in some cases, it messed up layouts that looked fine in Word. There were also too many UI differences for my taste.
Microsoft themselves keep messing up the Office UIs with all sorts of junk, but at least it's an industry standard, which spares me all sorts of potential compatibility issues with open software.
Thunderbird is fine, but I don't like the fad of showing timestamps as 'today', '1 hour ago', etc. I prefer dd/mm/yyyy hh:m... See more I tried OpenOffice some years ago, but in some cases, it messed up layouts that looked fine in Word. There were also too many UI differences for my taste.
Microsoft themselves keep messing up the Office UIs with all sorts of junk, but at least it's an industry standard, which spares me all sorts of potential compatibility issues with open software.
Thunderbird is fine, but I don't like the fad of showing timestamps as 'today', '1 hour ago', etc. I prefer dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm:ss timestamps, and Outlook can do that. Maybe there is a setting for that in Thunderbird.
The Outlook Android app doesn't support POP3, so I accidentally deleted a couple of business emails permanently, as it wiped them from my server too via IMAP when I deleted them on my phone. I then wiped their useless app and reinstalled Bluemail. I don't know if it's open, but at least it's free. The Gmail app too doesn't work, as it failed to download some of the emails from my server. In an earlier version, it was impossible to prevent it from grouping emails into conversations, a feature I find confusing. How can it be so difficult for multi-$$$$$$$$$ companies to make a decent basic email app?
Neither Outlook for Windows nor Gmail.com allows the user to disable their dysfunctional spam filters. For Outlook, I need to go into the Windows Registry to zap the spam filter. That's the only way to stop it. Not very user-friendly. As for Gmail.com, one needs to set up a filter with a criterion that will match any email and tell it not to send it to spam. Not very user-friendly either. I hate that nanny attitude that they insist on 'protecting' us against our will, with the result that we get false positives into the spam folders.
Once I tried to convert from Chrome to Firefox, the latter messed up a large number of imported bookmarks, as I had bookmarks with the same names in several folders. The Firefox developers had never thought of such a scenario.
Me too, I don't care much for giving money to companies like Microsoft that waste our licence fees on UI fashion and fads instead of dealing with issues that users are complaining about, but I consider it the least bad option. At least I have support if something goes wrong. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Mr. Satan (X)
English to Indonesian
| Open-source Software | Aug 23, 2022 |
Tom in London wrote:
In my opinion we should all be working our way, gradually, away from these pay-every-month rip-off applications and adopting OpenSource applications instead - supporting them with small financial contributions as and when we can. This is surely the way of the future.
Off-topic
A bit of clarification here. Open-source doesn’t necessarily refer to the price (or lack thereof) of the software. The developers can still charge the users for support and/or other perks. Examples include the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise, where they charge the end-users to use their products in exchange for technical supports. Another example that is relevant to this profession is Swordfish Translation Editor. For this reason, we open-source advocates prefer to use the word “libre” instead of “free”, as the former represents the core philosophy of this movement better.
What makes software open-source is that the codes can be audited by the general public. The benefit of this is obvious: if there’s a malicious string of code buried within the software, everyone would know. Another great advantage is the codes can be adopted by anyone, and they can create a fork of their own. If a great software a lot of people depend on was abandoned by the original devs, some other people could pick where they left off and continue the development.
On-topic
Regarding MS Office alternative, I have heard from the open-source community that OnlyOffice is very good when it comes to compatibility with Microsoft’s suites. I haven’t tried this myself, since I find LibreOffice to be sufficient for my needs.
The major drawbacks that may put people off are:
1) it’s a cloud-based office suite,
2) it’s made by a Russian company. I know this would offend some people around here.
Some also argued that it is not truly libre, since the infrastructure is well within their control. But this is getting into software politics, so let’s just leave it at that. 
| | | | neilmac
Spain
Local time: 23:29
Spanish to English
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One of my direct, non-agency clients uses Open Office software nowadays. However, rather than obliging me to install and learn how to use it, they let me convert the files to Word and return the translated documents to them, which they can then convert back into OO.
The rest of my clients are quite happy to use and receive documents in standard MS Office Word/Excel/PPT format.
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Metin Demirel 
Türkiye
Local time: 00:29
Member (2018)
Italian to Turkish
+ ...
Tom in London wrote:
...away from these pay-every-month rip-off applications...
I update my MS Office subscription every year with cheap OEM licences, and they are really, really cheap.
What application is it that made you consider switching to open-source alternatives, and how much are they asking for it?
[Edited at 2022-08-23 18:05 GMT]
| | | | Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 22:29
Member (2008)
Italian to English
TOPIC STARTER | You asked, I reply | Aug 23, 2022 |
Metin Demirel wrote:
What application is it that made you consider switching to open-source alternatives, and how much are they asking for it?
1. MS Office
2. I have no idea: too much. I refuse to pay a repeating subscription for the use of a software application that gets worse, not better. I think of the millions who pay up obediently, and I estimate how much money Microsoft is making every month *for nothing*. I already have enough monthly bills to pay and these are going to increase dramatically in the coming months. Far from signing up for additional monthly outgoings, I'm cancelling those that are not absolutely essential.
You asked, I replied.
| | | | Metin Demirel
Türkiye
Local time: 00:29
Member (2018)
Italian to Turkish
+ ...
| OEM licenses | Aug 23, 2022 |
Tom in London wrote: Metin Demirel wrote:
What application is it that made you consider switching to open-source alternatives, and how much are they asking for it? 1. MS Office 2. I have no idea: too much. I refuse to pay a repeating subscription for the use of a software application that gets worse, not better. I think of the millions who pay up obediently, and I estimate how much money Microsoft is making every month *for nothing*. I already have enough monthly bills to pay and these are going to increase dramatically in the coming months. Far from signing up for additional monthly outgoings, I'm cancelling those that are not absolutely essential. You asked, I replied.
Thank you. I only asked to understand your concern better so I can offer my perspective. The OEM licenses are really cheap. I pay like 2 or 3 dollars every year for MS Office subscription.
4 years ago, I had decided to go completely open source (actually I used to make that decision every 2 or 3 years and switch back to Windows due to compatibility reasons). I cannot say I have been able to find a workable solution to do my job solely on open-source systems and applications. My main concern wasn't the money though. I wanted to have a stable system and get rid of Microsoft products.
Performance-wise Linux has been good to me. But I had to have a dual-boot system. So when I had to use Trados, I would boot Windows, and for everything else, I used Linux as my daily driver (CafeTran and LibreOffice). I also had a third partition on my disk to store data to which I could access both from Windows and Linux.
As for the browser, FireFox was good enough. And the mail client was something called "Mail". The operating system was elementary OS, a distribution that is minimalist to the core. I loved it.
But it didn't work. I think LibreOffice is much good as MS Office. Yet it had compatibility problems, which is not LibreOffice's fault. The layouts and highlights that I used to make on my files weren't there when the client opened them on Word or Excel.
Finally I bought a MacBook, on which I use Windows and Linux with great performance thanks to Parallels Desktop. I also use MS Office natively on macOS and I haven't had any problem so far.
As Novian explained, the "free" in open-source does not refer to the money, but the freedom. I don't know how much would be a convenient price for the service you're getting from MS Office, but it shouldn't be too much to bother you. Other than the life-time licenses I bought for 2 CAT tools and Parallels Desktop, I also pay for the subscription-basis services like the cloud, ProZ, domain names, etc.. These are business costs. If we are not able to pay them, something's wrong, but not how much they cost. It must be something else.
PS: While I have never been a satisfied Windows user, I must admit that the Office suite is a wonderful product Microsoft has to offer.
| | | | Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 23:29
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
Tom in London wrote:
So far I'm a satisfied user of an OpenSource browser (Firefox) and an OpenSource email client (Thunderbird).
This is fine, because the browser doesn't produce any files that you might share with someone else, and the e-mail client produces files that are in a reasonably standardized format, and e-mail clients typically are very forgiving for slight differences in the interpretation of the e-mail format standards (such as they exist). Also, you're unlikely to deliver an e-mail to a client as a final product (you might deliver the translation directly inside an e-mail, but the expectation is that the client will then copy the translation into another file or format of his choice).
I've tried using LibreOffice instead - which is a worthy effort to make available an OpenSource free office suite that is compatible with MSOffice.
It's important, when delivering work to a client, that you deliver it in a format that satisfies the client's needs. For simple documents, LibreOffice might work because it can save files in the DOCX format. But you're always taking a risk that the client's document uses some kind of feature that LibreOffice does not support. It's fine if you're the kind of translator that translates from hardcopy (i.e. you create the translated file from scratch), but it's a different matter if you receive files from the client and then translate them by overtyping them.
I'm sorry to hear that LibreOffice crashes on your machine, but OpenOffice & LibreOffice was never really intended for use on a Mac, and the Mac builds are always a work in progress. You can also try NeoOffice (a fork of OpenOffice, made specifically for the Mac). A number of other office suites also claim support for Mac, e.g. Softmaker's FreeOffice (not opensource).
In my opinion we should all be working our way, gradually, away from these pay-every-month rip-off applications and adopting OpenSource applications instead...
Whether a product is opensource or closed source does not say anything about the morals of its developers. Opensource products do not necessarily have the moral high ground.
[Updated]
[Edited at 2022-08-24 08:03 GMT]
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Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 22:29
Member (2008)
Italian to English
TOPIC STARTER | Open or Libre | Aug 24, 2022 |
Samuel Murray wrote:
I'm sorry to hear that OpenOffice crashes on your machine, but OpenOffice was never really intended for use on a Mac, and the Mac builds are always a work in progress. You can also try LibreOffice
I said I was using LibreOffice, not OpenOffice (which I didn't mention but don't assume I don't know what it is).
| | | | Joakim Braun
Sweden
Local time: 23:29
German to Swedish
+ ...
| No, but I'd like to | Aug 24, 2022 |
Tom in London wrote:
In my opinion we should all be working our way, gradually, away from these pay-every-month rip-off applications and adopting OpenSource applications instead (...)
Yes! In my country we can still buy MS Office for a one-time payment, though (lacking some cloud services).
Unfortunately, for the really expensive stuff (Adobe) subscriptions are mandatory.
I do most of my translation directly in Word without CAT, and tried OO about 10 years ago. The UI cosmetics are worse than Word (which is bad), but I could live with that. Unfortunately, complicated tables tended to turn out a bit different. Layout equivalency in all situations is absolutely critical (and, to be fair, almost impossible to achieve for the developer), so I quickly abandoned OO.
(Back when I tried OO the VBA macro functionality was bad. I don't know how that works today, but for replacing Excel that's another issue: all macros must work.)
[Bearbeitet am 2022-08-24 08:18 GMT]
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Joakim Braun wrote:
I do most of my translation directly in Word without CAT
What kind of texts do you translate?
(Back when I tried OO the VBA macro functionality was bad.
I've invested a lot of time to learn VBA, so good support for this is absolutely critical for me.
| | | | Joakim Braun
Sweden
Local time: 23:29
German to Swedish
+ ...
Hans Lenting wrote:
What kind of texts do you translate?
Mostly financial reports, contracts, marketing, press releases, some technical material, certificates...
For 90% of these OO would work fine, but if 100% compatibility is not guaranteed, I still need to check what the delivery looks like in the standard software that the customer has... MS Word. After all, 0.1 points' difference can create a pagebreak somewhere.
[Bearbeitet am 2022-08-24 08:55 GMT]
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Baran Keki
Türkiye
Local time: 00:29
Member
English to Turkish
I don't know much about computers in general, but you can't download and use pirate stuff (torrents) on Mac as you do on Windows computers, right?
| | | | Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 22:29
Member (2008)
Italian to English
TOPIC STARTER | OpenOffice/LibreOffice etc. | Aug 24, 2022 |
OpenSource software is here to stay and is being continuously developed.
The developers are volunteers who rely on input from users. Nobody is making a profit, so progress is slow.
Over time, in years to come, applications like OpenOffice/LibreOffice will improve. We're in this for the long term.
Support them! In the end we can put Microsoft out of business.
| | | | Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 22:29
Member (2008)
Italian to English
TOPIC STARTER
Baran Keki wrote:
I don't know much about computers in general, but you can't download and use pirate stuff (torrents) on Mac as you do on Windows computers, right?
Downloading cracked versions of software from torrents is a great way to infect your computer with viruses, and then pass them on to others using illegally created MSOffice documents.
One positive thing about the Mac OS is that Apple makes this very difficult to do although it is not impossible if you're willing to take risks.
[Edited at 2022-08-24 09:05 GMT]
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